All of us as vital as the one light
we move through . . .

 

What do I love about America? That was the question that eventually yielded the very first draft of “One Today.” My initial answer was simply, The spirit of its people. And I had begun writing the poem on that impulse, trusting that it and the creative process would lead me to discover something magical. Indeed, much of the creative process happens unconsciously, and I’m always amazed by the way unconscious feelings surface in poems, leading to a new or refined understanding of ourselves. How they always seem to teach me something about myself and my world that I hadn’t really acknowledged before. And how they often affect the reader in the same way. During the revision process, as I took a microscopic view of the poem, I began to uncover the many conscious and subconscious experiences—past and present—that had influenced and informed its images, themes, and construction.

Most significant, I discovered that the inspiration for “One Today” harkened back to the story I was born into: the story of the close-knit community of Cuban exiles that instilled in me a deep sense of mutual respect, compassion, and oneness. I remembered my brother and me spending almost every weekend with our parents’ haciendo visitas—visiting relatives and their old friends from Cuba, especially the elderly or less fortunate than us who had just emigrated. My mother would show up with a homemade flan or a home-sewn blouse, sometimes a garbage bag full of toys or clothes my brother and I had outgrown, and sometimes just a can of Cuban coffee she had found on sale. My father would bring his tool box, ready to replace a leaky faucet, install a new door lock, or fix a broken chair.

And there were those who helped us: When we emigrated from Spain to New York City, my tía Olga and tío Armando had already set up an apartment for us in their building with two months’ rent prepaid and a job for my father working at a bomb factory. Three months and four days after we arrived in the United States, my father wrote a letter in his poor English thanking the welfare and social services departments for their help and letting them know we would no longer be needing assistance. I stole a carboncopy of that letter from my mother’s keepsake box; it’s now one of my treasured mementos. Every now and then, when I am organizing my office closet or riffling through it looking for something I’ve lost, I find the letter and am struck again by my parents’ courage and dignity.

The same spirit of my exile community was rekindled when Mark and I moved nearly five years ago to Bethel, Maine, a small rural town of about 2,500 residents. I had expected to become enchanted by its quaintness—and I did. But more so, I was charmed by its townspeople, who, from the start, went out of their way to make the two gay guys from Miami (as we were known affectionately) feel welcomed—albeit in the most polite and reserved manner typical of New Englanders. Apple pies and housewarming gifts appeared on our porch from Cheri, our real estate agent; Pok Sun inducted us into the coveted chopstick club at her Korean restaurant; Susan and Mike made sure we didn’t miss a single summer barbeque or dinner party in town. Perhaps I was still clinging to that television-brand America, but as months turned into years, I began to feel right at home in Bethel, fulfilled by the simple pleasures of walking down our Main Street and waving hello to friends with a smile, spending fifteen minutes talking (and gossiping) in the post office, or running into friends at a restaurant and putting tables together to break bread.

When the news of my selection was made public on January 8, Bethel lived up to my small-town ideal. Jewel, a yodeling champ and folk artist extraordinaire, sweetened our lives with homemade macaroons. Holly gave Mark and me free “make-overs” and began selling copies of my books at her beauty salon. Julie eased our stress with free massages. The proprietors of the Bethel Inn, Mame and Allen, set up a room free of charge for my interviews with National Public Radio and the New York Times. Mark’s business partners at the lab told him to take off all the time he needed to help me, and his office assistants (Tara, Bailey, Willow, and Sarah) also helped with phone calls and all sorts of miscellaneous tasks. All this generosity let Mark continue managing logistics, freeing up my time to keep working on “One Today.” In fact, it was living proof of the central themes of unity and support that had taken root in the poem. Flash forward to my homecoming celebration, organized by the community on my forty-fifth birthday: a six-foot-long cake, a reading at the auditorium with six hundred attendees, a lifetime ski pass, and the naming of a ski run after “One Today.”

In Miami there was a similar outpouring. I received dozens of heartwarming messages of congratulations from proud friends, relatives, former professors, and engineering coworkers. My mother’s neighbors thought she had won the lottery when the news vans swarmed her house. Suddenly my baby pictures and photos of our family vacations, birthday parties, and weddings flashed on every news channel, as well as interviews of my mother and brother telling our story. A wave of nostalgia came over me, even as I continued working on “One Today.” I wanted to hop on a flight and return to the city where most of my life had unfolded: childhood summers with my grandparents in South Beach amid the then-crumbling Art Deco hotels; years later, the nights of my youth at those same hotels, renovated into nightclubs where I learned to dance salsa; the countless number of stops for shots of Cuban coffee and guava pastelitos at cafeterías dotting every street of the city, the same streets and neighborhoods I renovated as an engineer. Flash forward to my Miami homecoming: 1,400 people in attendance at the Arsht Center of the Performing Arts for my poetry reading, where I was presented with the keys to the city and a proclamation marking February 22 as Richard Blanco Day in Miami-Dade County.

Clad with pines or flanked by palm trees, edged by snow-capped mountains or sea-green shores, Bethel and the Miami I grew up in are similar communities in heart and spirit. Miami was the city of my story, and Bethel was the American counterpart of the story I had been foolishly searching for on old TV sitcoms. There was a real America after all, just not the one I had imagined. Although worlds apart, both my nostalgic memories of my Miami and my present-day Bethel came together through the writing of “One Today.” I realized that both communities held several essential things in common for me: respect for the importance of each individual, compassion for one another, and, most important, a deep, abiding sense of dignity and unity.

My poetic sensibilities understood these as the most endearing and enduring qualities of the American spirit. “One Today” became an extension of those values and fundamental beliefs that I wished America to reconnect with as a nation-village, especially in light of so much strife and political division in recent years. In my mind, the purpose of being the inaugural poet and of my poem was to transcend politics and envision a new relationship between all Americans. I wanted America to embrace itself, so to speak, and recognize—no, feel—how we are all an essential part of one whole, if only for those few minutes when I would stand at the podium. Finally I grasped the underlying tension I had been searching for in the poem: namely, the wishing for, the striving for the ideal of being or becoming one, not just for a day, but every day. I came to understand the poem as a kind of prayer, an invocation, with an appeal to our higher selves at its emotional center.